Complex data visualization design projects often entail collaboration between people with different visualization-related skills. For example, many teams include both designers who create new visualization designs and developers who implement the resulting visualization software. We identify gaps between data characterization tools, visualization design tools, and development platforms that pose challenges for designer-developer teams working to create new data visualizations. While it is common for commercial interaction design tools to support collaboration between designers and developers, creating data visualizations poses several unique challenges that are not supported by current tools. In particular, visualization designers must characterize and build an understanding of the underlying data, then specify layouts, data encodings, and other data-driven parameters that will be robust across many different data values. In larger teams, designers must also clearly communicate these mappings and their dependencies to developers, clients, and other collaborators. We report observations and reflections from five large multidisciplinary visualization design projects and highlight six data-specific visualization challenges for design specification and handoff. These challenges include adapting to changing data, anticipating edge cases in data, understanding technical challenges, articulating data-dependent interactions, communicating data mappings, and preserving the integrity of data mappings across iterations. Based on these observations, we identify opportunities for future tools for prototyping, testing, and communicating data-driven designs, which might contribute to more successful and collaborative data visualization design.

A simple procedure is described for the mechanical isolation of protoplasts of unfertilized and fertilized barley egg cells from dissected ovules. Viable protoplasts were isolated from ~75% of the dissected ovules. Unfertilized protoplasts did not divide, whereas almost all fertilized protoplasts developed into microcalli. These degenerated when grown in medium only. When cocultivated with barley microspores undergoing microspore embryogenesis, the protoplasts of the fertilized egg cells developed into embryo-like structures that gave rise to fully fertile plants. On average, 75% of cocultivated protoplasts of fertilized egg cells developed into embryo-like structures. Fully fertile plants were regenerated from ~50% of the embryo-like structures. The isolation-regeneration techniques may be largely genotype independent, because similar frequencies were obtained in two different barley varieties with very different performance in anther and microspore culture. Protoplasts of unfertilized and fertilized eggs of wheat were isolated by the same procedure, and a fully fertile wheat plant was regenerated by cocultivation with barley microspores.

People typically interact with information visualizations using a mouse. Their physical movement, orientation, and distance to visualizations are rarely used as input. We explore how to use such spatial relations among people and visualizations (i.e., proxemics) to drive interaction with visualizations, focusing here on the spatial relations between a single user and visualizations on a large display. We implement interaction techniques that zoom and pan, query and relate, and adapt visualizations based on tracking of users' position in relation to a large high-resolution display. Alternative prototypes are tested in three user studies and compared with baseline conditions that use a mouse. Our aim is to gain empirical data on the usefulness of a range of design possibilities and to generate more ideas. Among other things, the results show promise for changing zoom level or visual representation with the user's physical distance to a large display. We discuss possible benefits and potential issues to avoid when designing information visualizations that use proxemics.

Large, high-resolution displays offer new opportunities for visualizing and interacting with data. However, interaction techniques for such displays mostly support window manipulation and pointing, ignoring many activities involved in data analysis. We report on 11 workshops with data analysts from various fields, including artistic photography, phone log analysis, astrophysics, and health care policy. Analysts were asked to walk through recent tasks using actual data on a large whiteboard, imagining it to be a large display. From the resulting comments and a video analysis of behavior in the workshops, we generate ideas for new interaction techniques for large displays. These ideas include supporting sequences of visualizations with backtracking and fluid exploration of alternatives; using distance to the display to change visualizations; and fixing variables and data sets on the display or relative to the user.

Overview of time spent video conferencing from March 16 to June 4 with concentrated synchronous design activities visible from late March to mid May; pivot points in the design process seen on April 2 when members C and D met for a prolonged design session using dual cameras as discussed in Section 7. See Table 2 for team roles.

In this article, we present PixelClipper, a tool built for facilitating data engagement events. PixelClipper supports conversations around visualizations in public settings through annotation and commenting capabilities. It is recognized that understanding data is important for an informed society. However, even when visualizations are available on the web, open data is not yet reaching all audiences. Public facilitated events centered around data visualizations may help bridge this gap. PixelClipper is designed to promote discussion and engagement with visualizations in public settings. It allows viewers to quickly and expressively extract visual clippings from visualizations and add comments to them. Ambient and facilitator displays attract attention by showing clippings. They function as entry points to the full visualizations while supporting deeper conversations about the visualizations and data. We describe the design goals of PixelClipper, share our experiences from deploying it, and discuss its future potential in supporting data visualization engagement events.

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IntroductionThe unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic unveiled a strong need for advanced and informative surveillance tools. The Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) at the University of Calgary took action to develop a surveillance dashboard, which would facilitate the education of the public, and answer critical questions posed by local and national government. ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to create an interactive method of surveillance, or a “COVID-19 Tracker” for Canadian use. The Tracker offers user-friendly graphics characterizing various aspects of the current pandemic (e.g. case count, testing, hospitalizations, and policy interventions). MethodsSix publicly available data sources were used, and were selected based on the frequency of updates, accuracy and types of data, and data presentation. The datasets have different levels of granularity for different provinces, which limits the information that we are able to show. Additionally, some datasets have missing entries, for which the “last observation carried forward” method was used. The website was created and hosted online, with a backend server, which is updated on a daily basis. The Tracker development followed an iterative process, as new figures were added to meet the changing needs of policy-makers. ResultsThe resulting Tracker is a dashboard that visualizes real-time data, along with policy interventions from various countries, via user-friendly graphs with a hover option that reveals detailed information. The interactive features allow the user to customize the figures by jurisdiction, country/region, and the type of data shown. Data is displayed at the national and provincial level, as well as by health regions. ConclusionsThe COVID-19 Tracker offers real-time, detailed, and interactive visualizations that have the potential to shape crucial decision-making and inform Albertans and Canadians of the current pandemic.